Sermon for 2/1
“Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit”
Epiphany 4A
Text: Matthew 5:1-12
I’m sure that most of us good southerners in here have heard the phrase: “Well, bless their heart.”
And truthfully, most of us have probably used it in some form or fashion. The thing about a phrase like “bless their heart” is that it is so versatile.
For example, if someone gets BAD news, you might comment, “That is just terrible; well, bless her heart.” By saying the phrase in this instance, you are expressing sympathy and compassion, maybe genuine concern, for that person and you are sorry for what they’re going through. It could also imply that you are praying for them.
It could also be that you hear the phrase when someone does something embarrassing – or you might say, dumb – and another person responds, “He’s really having a hard time, isn’t he? Bless his heart.”
In this case, the phrase tends to imply that you find the situation funny, but you might also understand the embarrassment that they must be feeling.
“Bless their heart” might even be used in a more derogatory fashion – to soften a blow or insult – something like “his elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top, bless his heart.”
The latter of those might be double-points since it uses two well-known phrases – I don’t know…
Usage of the phrase has spread so much that it seems like you can say just about anything, whether it has a positive connotation or not, whether it is actually kind or not, so long as you add “bless their heart” at the end of what you’re saying.
And then if you are listening to “bless your heart” comments, you have to listen for the inflection of the words and how they are said, otherwise it can remain a mystery of how someone intended the phrase.
Bless your heart.
In some ways, you could say that the Bible is really the story of God’s desire to bless us.
It started at the beginning.
The very first thing that God did after creating us was to bless us.
Genesis 1:27-28 recounts the blessing: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
It could even be said that God created us in order to bless us.
And throughout Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, God’s Word shows us all the many and various ways in which God blesses us.
God created us to bless us, and even when we fall short, God blesses us with the gift of forgiveness and reconciliation.
The greatest blessing that God gave us, of course, is the gift of his own son, Jesus. And Jesus devoted his ministry on earth to continuing what his heavenly Father had done from the beginning, to bless us.
It is the very reason Jesus became flesh, to bless us with his love, healing, forgiveness, and with the gift of eternal life.
Everything that Jesus did, from his birth to the cross, was done to bless us. And our risen Savior still desires nothing more than to bless us all.
And this brings me to the Beatitudes, which form the beginning of Jesus’ most famous sermon, his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), three full chapters of his blessed teaching.
And the very first word of this famous sermon is “blessed.”
The Latin word for blessed is what gives us the familiar name of the beginning of this sermon – the “Beatitudes.”
In nine wonderful statements, Jesus offers nine incredible blessings. But these blessings are not what we expect!
The “poor in spirit” are blessed by Jesus? “Those who mourn”? “The meek”? Even those who are “persecuted for the sake of righteousness”?
What does Jesus mean by all of this? How can it be true? And what does it teach us about our blessed life in Christ?
Jesus starts out by blessing the poor in spirit. That is how this whole sermon begins: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
And for the sake of time, that is the one that I want to focus on today. Blessed are the poor in spirit.
And that describes some of us here this morning, if we’re honest.
Think of our faith as being like the gasoline that fuels our life with God. If that’s the case, then when we are poor in spirit, our tank is a little low. And when our tank is a little low, we have trouble seeing God at work in this world, or in our life.
We feel discouraged. Weary. Worn out. Poor in spirit.
And if that is the case for you right now, then Jesus says come: come all who are weary, and find rest for your soul. Learn from Jesus, who is gentle and humble in heart.
Blessed are you who are poor in spirit, and know it, for yours is the kingdom of heaven.
Why would Jesus bless the poor in spirit?
What does it mean to be poor in spirit?
And what did Jesus mean by this blessing, and by the accompanying promise that “theirs is the kingdom of heaven”?
We don’t typically think of being poor as being blessed, and being poor in spirit certainly doesn’t sound like a good thing. But what Jesus means here is simply that the poor in spirit are those who know how much they need God.
They know that they cannot be blessed in any other way. When we are poor in spirit, we know that we need God’s help and God’s mercy.
We are desperate. We have tried everything else. And we have learned that there is nothing that gives our life meaning apart from God.
And so, we have turned to God. We sit at the feet of Jesus, seeking nothing but his love. And he looks at us with love. And blesses us. And promises us the very kingdom of heaven.
In his book on the Beatitudes, “The Ladder of the Beatitudes,” Jim Forest writes that the Beatitudes offer “the whole gospel in a grain of salt.”
They offer us a summary of much of what Jesus came to teach us, a path of discipleship, a way of living as a follower of Jesus.
And this journey begins with being poor in spirit; it begins with the simple recognition that we need Jesus.
When we realize this, we are ready to let go of everything that leads us away from Christ.
We are ready to take up our cross and follow him. We are ready to seek first his kingdom.
We are ready to live the life that we were created to live, every moment of every day in the recognition that we have no good apart from Jesus.
This first Beatitude stands at the beginning because it is the gate through which we must pass if we are to follow Jesus.
We must first recognize our poverty of spirit.
We must let go of everything else, everything that we have ever tried to do or to be or to have in order to discover the blessed life.
Once we have done that, we are ready to enter the kingdom of heaven.
And Jesus is ready to lead us there, every blessed step of the way.
So, I invite you to join me this day and every day in seeking the life that is truly blessed, the life that begins with recognizing that we are poor in spirit and seeking first the kingdom of God.
Something for you to think about. Amen.
